Hiroshima in the Morning (20 page)

Should I give up my insistence that I will continue my interviews and research once my family arrives? Am I wrong to stand up for myself in my arguments with Brian, especially when I don’t know exactly what I’m standing for? Before I came to Japan, this stubborn gut feeling was rare; it was so easy for me to get “talked out” of something. It wasn’t that I was forced; I accommodated the most peaceful solution. But now that I can feel my gut, now that it’s awake and fighting for the needs I can still meet, I’m surprised at how unyielding Brian’s opposition is.

We are in Kaki, and before that, in Geihoku, in Yawata, but I have no orientation, and no idea where those places are. Earlier today, I visited a large traditional farmhouse with a thatched roof made of pampa grass rising easily thirty or forty feet high. The entire exterior was composed of sliding doors—paper screens and stucco—so that in the summer, the farmhouse was completely open to the outside. It was
designed, in this very cold weather, to let the hot summer air rise out of the living space and the breeze circulate. The interior was a single, enormous room, with tracks and sliding doors in various places so that each area could be opened or closed and its shape shifted like a puzzle.

The farmhouse was a tourist attraction, and the guides were several very old, bent, and tiny women who were also selling produce and farm products outside. After conferring briefly with Kimiko, they invited us in and began telling stories about their lives in the “old days.” We sat around the
irori
, a rectangular hearth cut out of the tatami floor with a small wood-burning fire, and a hook hanging over it for an iron tea kettle or pot, where one of them grilled
mochi
for their guests. They led a brief tour, showed off the interior barn where animals were kept so they didn’t freeze to death in the winter. It had been turned into a storeroom, for baskets and buckets and sieves; for the farming equipment: arching two-handled saws, cone-shaped sun hats and raincoats made of untamed straw. They showed off the kitchen, and the two white-stone ovens just for cooking rice. In the old days of these women’s lives, it was a woman’s job to start the fire and make rice and get the house ready before everyone got up. I was reminded of one of my very modern peace activist friends who, in the year 2001, still rises every morning a half an hour before her husband wakes up “so he can feel like the house is not sleeping.” This youngish wife makes no elaborate breakfast—the rice is warm, the miso soup simple—so it’s not as if she needs all that time for preparation. It is his comfort, and his request, and after he’s
gone to work, she goes back to sleep for an hour until her work day begins.

The women talked about the war, and how people made their way back from the bombed city. How many hours it took to walk—uphill, downhill—if you ever wanted to leave. I watched them speak. I looked at their missing teeth, at their faces so gnarled they looked as though beauty had never touched them. Not that they weren’t beautiful in their waning years, in their baggy
monpe
clothing and their indigo-dyed head wraps; not that they weren’t beautiful when they were young. But they looked as if they’d lived a life in which there was no use for a bit of powder on their cheeks, a kimono with a gay pattern and a flattering color instead of one that was chosen for the warmth. What was it like to live a life without artifice? Where your sole measure was what your body could endure, how many hours of work you could complete, whether you could pull a plow when you had no animal to do it? Not by what you said you were, or could do, but by what you produced.

My life, right now, is the opposite. I’m allowing my interviews to go anywhere, logic and factual details be damned. My days alternate between life and death: between solitude, and hiding from Brian and America, and experience—loving every circle of my bicycle’s wheel as I ride along the river, every trip, every person. I have dropped out of my own “old days” before Japan; I am avoiding the constraints and expectations that have become far too visible by refusing to see them, in much the same stubborn way as a young child believes that a person ceases to exist when he leaves
the room. I have been put on notice, and every moment is a moment stolen, a different kind of cheating—the cheating of staying in Japan, and standing strong, but not of actually doing the work. I have not begun my new novel; my interviews are not even transcribed. My writing has been narcissistic: reams of paper on what I did that day, but no manuscript to show for it. I’ve been unable to produce what I came to write.

Unable to face what I truly fear.

It is not my fellowship I’m afraid of losing. It’s my life. Every time I forget a word, I think,
so this is how it begins
. I can tell myself I am trying to function in two languages now. I can recall my father’s assurances that writers access words at the much slower pace of their fingers; I can treasure the slips of others who comment carelessly that their minds are sieves and they must be getting old. Then, too, pregnancy can rob you of your memory; more than once when I was pregnant I walked into a room and forgot what I went there for. But wouldn’t I get that back? Not every woman who has given birth suddenly forgets the word for “television.” Even if I don’t own one, isn’t that a bad sign? And how will I know if there really is a problem, if this thing that is stealing my mother is also in my body and I, too, have only two decades left?

I am my mother’s daughter after all. People used to say we could be sisters.

Time is the question. How will I know when time is short, where time should be spent, what to focus on? What of my
own
time: who should I give it to? I know what the
answer should be, but still, I want it for myself. Everything I’ve given my family, so far, seems to have disappeared in one way or another. If this is all I have, all I will ever be, I cannot bear to let it go to waste.

But on my own, I’m not doing much better. I am eating bits of burned, hard
mochi
, and trying not to yawn. Kimiko is the one asking the questions. Kimiko is the one taking the pictures. Kimiko can sense the changes in me, my losses; she knows what I need for the novel, and I trust her absolutely. I need her absolutely. I have no way to guess whether I am hiding or emerging, whether I am healing or being reckless; I can’t tell what she understands, or how she will do it, but with the foreign language blurring in my ears, I know Kimiko is the one who will rescue me.

I need to be saved.

THERE IS ONE SMALL TOWEL, one bit of white terry cloth. In length, if you are using body parts to measure, it should extend from the middle of an average Japanese woman’s breasts—just above the nipple—to just beneath her pubic hair. But of course, this is the essential bit of information I am lacking, which Kimiko holds, but doesn’t, in her amusement and our privacy, bother to offer. I know that, due to a curious sense of economy, this is the instrument I am supposed to cover with soap and water and use to scrub myself off before getting into the
onsen
water, and it’s the same instrument that will dry me off when I am done. There is a bucket too, that serves both as a stool (to sit on while washing) and a container for the wet towel.

 

I HAVE BECOME Kimiko’s daughter, and her friend. She is the one who calls to find out how my day was, even after midnight because she can see my bedroom lights through her window across the river and knows if I’m awake. I am alone, she is alone, and though I didn’t ask her to, I appreciate the chat, late at night, the checking in, not much to say. Today, her latest gift to me, she is treating me to a day of lounging at a fancy spa on the tip of Shikoku. The family is coming soon, she says. She does not have to say the words,
You need this
. Between baths, we sprawl together on the comfy sofas in the lobby and nap.

 

THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I have been privy to the lives of older women. In interviews, sad stories; in my friendships. Here, women who have lost husbands or left them; left children or had them leave or fought to get them back; who have struggled with life and come out the other side. Not monsters, just people. And successful in their own way: loved, forgiven, triumphant, with some regrets but no fatal blow. They look at me, the American taking a hiatus to chase her dream, and they give me what I need: their stories, unspun. I can only guess at the courage it must take to share their lives. And if their stories seem to circle in on their difficulties and choices about mothering, I have no need for their perfection, just as they seem to have no need for mine.

 

IT WAS JUST YESTERDAY when Jane, too, took me out to “celebrate” at a restaurant that specialized in Okinawan food. “You’ll be okay,” she said, her face in profile. “My children survived. I told you—I was working a lot. I was traveling, for years I traveled . . . ”

Was it the unspoken Jane wanted me to hear in the long pause that followed, or my own narrative? What was it she told me:
my children stayed with my parents
. . .

“It worked out okay.”

If Jane and I had barely spoken of her family, I’d said even less about my own. She watched me once, through a wall of glass, fighting with Brian, but that can be all she knows.

“Did I tell you?” she asked then, “I was thinking the other day, about my grandmother.” And then she told me
her father’s memory of the last time he saw his mother as a child. If our conversation seemed scattered, it was exactly on point: how do we know if we can be salvaged, and what will or will not survive? There are no guarantees, only explanations; only choices that must be made and never unmade. I knew what Jane was offering: a model for getting older. She was stepping in for my own mother, to show me how to suffer and survive.

 

THERE IS ONE BASIC POOL inside the women’s
onsen
, and a heavy pour from a pipe that can be used to massage the shoulders. There is a shallow bed of water where four people can lie side by side with their necks resting on wooden pillows and sleep in the water. There is also an outdoor bath built from stones in the courtyard, and this is where I walk, naked among the shrubs where the breeze can lift the heat off my skin. Kimiko lets me go, lets me savor the day without comment. These are my final hours, and we both know it. On our way home, Kimiko will tell me about the modesty of the towel, but until then the tensile casing between me and the world, between me and myself, falls away and there are no rules for behavior. I am naked in Shikoku with a woman who accepts me exactly for whatever I am trying to be.

A COATLESS MID-NOVEMBER afternoon. Blue sky. On Miyajima—a small island in the Inland Sea that has been dubbed one of the three most beautiful places in all of Japan—the maples are starting to turn. It is a steep, densely forested place, more like a mountain, or two, rising out of the sea, its clusters of ancient buildings nestled along the shore. Today, fall is looming: bits of ruby, burnt orange, lemon-green scattered among the evergreens. The brilliance is still days away; it won’t explode until my family arrives.

I should be home, getting all my loose ends xeroxed, tallied and scrubbed clean, but instead, I am firewalking.